I love reading books about books, about readers, collections, libraries, and any other aspect of the printed word. Recently, I have been exploring "Extreme Reading" adventures where the authors have consumed a large number of books in a never-before-been-tried route. Whether reading an entire Encyclopedia Britannica, all 20 volumes of The Oxford English Dictionary, an entire shelf of library books, or the 51 books in the Harvard Classics, these people have passion and are not shy about pursuing their trail-blazing, quirky projects and then writing about the adventures.
Below are several absolutely delightful books tracing the humorous, trying, fascinating, and eye-opening discoveries these committed readers found along their unique pathways. They are all such personable authors who can express their passions so convincingly that each author made me consider retracing their footsteps to read the titles in their projects or take on an extreme reading project of my own. After all, as a kid I did read all 25 of the Tarzan books in order three times. Does that count?
This is a long post, but I hope you stick with it as there are some great books here. Consider the reading of this post your own extreme reading experience.
Happy reading.
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The Shelf: From LEQ to LES - Phyllis Rose
First Sentences:
This book records the history of an experiment.
Believing that literary critics wrongly favor the famous and canonical -- that is, writers chosen for us by others -- I wanted to sample, more democratically, the actual ground of literature. So I chose a fiction shelf in the New York Society Library somewhat at random -- it happens to be the LEQ-LES shelf -- and set out to read my way through it, writing about he experience as I went....I was certain, however, that no one in the history of the world had read exactly this series of novels. That made the project exciting to me.
I thought of my adventure as Off-Road or Extreme Reading. To go where no one had gone before.
Description:
When standing in the stacks of the New York Society Library, Phyllis Rose wonders about all the other books on the shelves that surround the books she is looking for. So she decides to find out by reading an entire shelf of library books. And it's not just any random shelf of library books, oh no. She creates criteria to insure randomness, diversity, and non-bias of the shelf to be read. Her shelf must contain:
- Several authors (and no more than five books by any one author);
- A mix of contemporary and older works;
- At least one book that is a classic she had not read;
- No books by an author she had already read
And boy, does she read them, looking up background on the Internet; finding other translations to help her understanding; contacting reviewers of the books who knew the authors; and even corresponding with the authors themselves to gain insight and even friendship.
In all, a thoroughly engaging ride through each book, with Rose carefully describing her experiences, good and bad, as she eagerly turns pages or flips ahead to see how much remains before calling it quits. Her writing sparkles with passion, confusion, and curiosity as each book enters her life and now ours.
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Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages - Ammon Shea
First Sentences:
There are some great words in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Words that are descriptive, intriguing, and funny. Words like artolater (the worshipper of bread)....
If you were to sit down and force yourself to read the whole thing over the course of several months, three things would likely happen: you would learn a great number of new words, your eyesight would suffer considerably, and your mind would most definitely slip a notch.Reading it is roughly the equivalent of reading the King James Bible in its entirety every day for two and a half months or reading a whole John Grisham novel every day for more than a year.
One would have to be mad to seriously consider such as undertaking. I took on the project with great excitement.
Description:
Just hefting the 137-pound The Oxford English Dictionary is daunting. To search for a specific words and definition in its 21,700 pages of fine print is terrifying. To read the entire 20-volume set of 59 million words seems impossible. But the rewards inside those covers, the beautifully-written definitions, the first occurrences of each word -- well, for some people this is heaven, the stuff of dreams. That goes double for Ammon Shea, who "collects words" and owns "a thousand volumes of dictionaries, thesauri, and assorted glossaries" that he reads for fun, finding the satisfaction and diversity that other people enjoy when re-reading their favorite novels. After all, "how many authors say something interesting on every single page?"
Shea reads the OED for 8-10 hours each day, sharing with readers his notes along with a few of the most interesting words and definitions in short chapters for each letter. He adds a brief, witty interpretation so we are very clear of the usage of each word. While this may not seem particularly interesting, he also includes clever and insightful tidbits about his adventures, the reactions of people (including his girlfriend who works as a lexicographer for the Miriam-Webster Dictionary), his failing eyesight, pounding headaches, a dictionary convention, the best place to read (the isolated basement of Hunter College library), and the shortcomings of the electronic version of the OED.
Along with his clever stories, we also learn of so many new, delightful words, like all-overish ("feeling an undefined sense of unwell that extends to the whole body"), gound ("the stuff that collects in the corners of the eyes"), hypergelast ("a person who will not stop laughing"), pessimum ("the worst possible conditions"), and xenium ("a gift given to a guest"). Who could not want to know these words and use them if possible? Shea reveals to us lucky readers special words that define our world clearly and concisely, giving answers to those times when we think "there must be a word for that."
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Howard's End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home - Susan Hill
First Sentences:
It began like this.
I went to the shelves on the landing to look for a book I knew was there. It was not. But plenty of others were and among them I noticed at least a dozen I realized I had never read...
I found the book I was looking for in the end, but by then it had become far more than a book. It marked the start of a journey through my own library....The journey through my own books involved giving up buying new ones....I felt the need to get to know my own books again....I wanted to repossess my books, to explore what I had accumulated over a lifetime or reading, and to map this house of many volumes....A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.
Description:
We all check out, buy, read, ignore, shelve, and stack up on our bedside table various books throughout our lives. Yet do we really remember all (any?) of these books? Susan Hill decides to find out by reacquainting herself with her sprawling collection, picking up titles she has never read or forgotten, reading them, and reporting on her experiences.
She lets her mind meander as she explores her collections of pop-up books, poetry, favorite authors (Dickens, Hardy, Wodehouse, Woolf), as well as tangents such as possible reasons she hasn't read some books, things she finds inside her books (receipts, notes, postcards), written notations and comments in books, slow reading, and the feel of books. She also selects the top forty books in her ideal collection. Thankfully, the list is included a the end.
I also realized that, like her, "I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA." I also marvelled on her musing that all of the books in her library were created using just 26 characters of the alphabet, "plus some small dots and curves of punctuation." How can you not love a person who can see the world of books in this way?
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The Know-It-All: One Man's Quest to Become the Smartest Man in the World - A.J. Jacobs
First Sentences:
I know the name of Turkey's leading avant-garde publication.
I know that John Quincy Adams married for money. I know that Bud Abbot was a double-crosser, that absentee ballots are very popular in Ireland, and that dwarves have prominent buttocks....
I know this because I have read the first hundred pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I feel as giddy as famed balloonist Ben Abruzzo on a high-altitude flight -- but also alarmed at the absurd amount of information in the world.. I feel as if I've just stuffed my brain till there are facts dribbling out my ears.
But mostly I'm determined. I'm going to read this book from A to Z -- or more precisely a-ak to zywiec. I'm not even out of the early As but I'm going to keep turning those pages till I'm done. I'm on my way. Just 32,900 pages to go!
Description:
I'm a huge A.J. Jacobs fan for his previous, off-beat works describing his adventures when he completely immerses himself in some new adventure such as The Year of Living Biblically (where he lives to follow all the commandments and tenets of the Bible), and Drop Dead Healthy (where he explores every health tip and practice available to achieve perfect health).
Here he takes on the Encyclopedia Britannica in its 32-volume entirety. Each chapter in The Know-It-All covers a different letter, full of interesting words, concepts, histories, and oddities he found. Intellectual pursuits naturally lead him to apply to join Mensa and try out for Jeopardy. He is obsessive, neurotic, dogged, and definitely passionate about his project. And because he is such a wonderfully funny writer, his reading journey an absolute pleasure to follow.
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First Sentences:
A few moments before midnight on New Year's eve, while December 2006 prepared to pass into January 2007, I sat alone in the library of my parents apartment on York Avenue in Manhattan...
Halfway between my family and the rest of the world, I read the first pages of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography....I should say here that my odd choice of reading material wasn't arbitrary. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the first volume of the Harvard Classics -- a fifty-volume set of "great books" compiled and published a century ago. Known informally as he Five-Foot Shelf, the set spans the time from the ancient Greeks to the end of the nineteenth century....
I had decided to read the entire Shelf over the course of the year to come.
I had heard rumors of the existence of the Harvard Classics, but had only seen small pieces of the set in used book stores and certainly never read more than parts of a couple of them.
Enter Christopher Beha to come to my rescue. After losing his job and moving back into his parents' house, he re-discovers an old set of the Classics purchased and read by his grandmother during the Depression, and decides to read them all himself.
But this project becomes more than just an exercise in perseverance. Beha uses the wisdom of these authors to help him deal with personal circumstances including serious illness and the death of a treasured aunt. These books were originally collected for the working class to expose them to the wisdom of the ages, but Beha finds that his education and experience make these books as relevant to his own situation now as they were 100 years ago.
He does not praise all books, and indeed skips over several after feeling the content and style did not have the power to speak to him. But what he does read and analyze is fascinating and eye-opening. Their words don't provide pat answers to his life and questions, but they do draw him back into the world. A very personal journey of discovery, wisdom, humor, and frustration with this exploration of the literature of the classic liberal arts education.
